Harry Halpin wrote:
> it still seems inherently to do a disservice to Web
> developers and the users of the Web to have two (three if you count
> microformats, which I would) divergent ways of putting data - say
> contact info - into a web-page.
minor note, there are way more than three ways actively being used
around the web:
- Microdata
- RDFa (1 and 1.1)
- Microformats
- <meta> and <link> (like DC. usage and opengraph)
- data-* attributes
- rdf/xml in comments
- turtle/n3 in <script> blocks
We can perhaps discount the last two as out of scope, and possibly even
the data-* attributes, however the first four are definitely active and
competing rather than complementing.
Alas, I personally can't see any technical reason why those four can't
all be unified or at least made to complement / extend one another.
On the 1-2 year timeline things are going to be rather a mess, if
metadata in HTML is important, then we need to look at the 5-10 year
timeline.
This leads me to suggest that framing this as an "RDFa/Microdata" task
force and problem is probably too little too late, and a waste of
people's time (particularly around political matters). It may have
worked back in 2009, can't see it standing a chance now.
Perhaps though, it's an ideal time to learn some lessons, see what
people actually are using and how they are using it, then plan a unified
solution for 2016 onwards. Or perhaps it's just best to sit back and see
what happens, then standardize the intersection / superset - which is a
little bit ironic giving these are solutions from a standardization body
- but it may not hurt too much.
Best,
Nathan